12th December 2011 Archive

Don’t worry, the XPS 14z may be one of Dell’s new "thin and powerful" range, but it doesn’t fit into the superslim Ultrabook category so there’s absolutely no need whatsoever for a gratuitous comparison with Apple's MacBook Air.

Earlier this week the Government announced proposals (40-page / 2.1MB PDF) to change the NHS Constitution so that information stored about patients would be automatically shared with life sciences researchers via a new anonymised database unless patients elect for their details not to be included.

The government has failed to routinely measure the benefits of its main portals - the Government Gateway, Directgov and Business.gov - which together have cost £90.3m over the past three years, says the National Audit Office (NAO).

NASA has announced that - all being well - the first mission to the International Space Station by a privately built and operated spacecraft will lift off on February 7. The craft will be a Dragon capsule launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket, both made and handled by techbiz visionary Elon Musk's new company SpaceX.

RIM's proxy-style web delivery is bypassing mobile network operators' filters on internet filth, including the thoroughly illegal sites listed by the Internet Watch Foundation, much to the delight disgust of the Daily Mail.

O2 claims to have become the first UK network operating to offer a leasing programme for smartphones. Customers will be able to rent iPhones for a year, eliminating the need for long-term commitment and large upfront costs.

The modern smartphone is the true Swiss Army knife of gadgets. Want to listen to music? Watch a video? Browse the web? Read a book? Keep up with your friends? Take a picture? Make a video? A smartphone can do all those things, with ever increasing competence.

We think a lot about the network that connects the client to the server room, but maybe not enough about the network inside the data centre. At least, until now. Our Reg poll shows that the problems of network consolidation, distributed apps and all that spaghetti stuff sticking out the back of your servers is beginning to worry you.

New evidence has emerged that shows that the News of the World was not responsible for deleting voicemail messages on murder victim Milly Dowler's phone, a move that gave her family false hope that the schoolgirl might still be alive.

Parts of southern Greenland apparently lurched upwards by as much as 20mm as glaciers melted and ran off into the sea during 2010, according to scientists. It's thought that as much as 100 billion tons more ice than usual may have vanished from the island's ice sheet that year.

Google's co-founders are on a mission to save NASA's Hangar One, which once housed the US Navy's airships at Moffett Field but has latterly been rented by the Chocolate Factory's top brass to provide a shelter for - among other things - a fighter jet.

The United Nations Organisation's COP17 climate conference has finished - and if you're a concerned energy user in IT manufacturing, an investor, or simply taxpayer, there shouldn't be anything the draft agreement to worry you. Not any more than you have to worry about already.

Mexico, China and other rising economies are quicker at employing new technologies than the UK, meaning that Britain is lagging behind in the shift to server virtualisation, according to a survey by Dell and Intel.

Chip maker Intel has slashed its final quarter outlook, admitting it will fall short of the company's previous forecast due to a hard drive supply shortage - sparked by flooding in Thai disk factories.

Microsoft has updated Azure in time for Christmas, with new tools for developers, reduced storage and operation costs for SQL, and Redmond’s promised integration with Hadoop as a limited preview for those who’ve been not naughty but nice.

Google security crews have tossed at least a dozen smartphone games out of the Android Market after discovering they contained secret code that caused owners to accrue expensive charges for text messages sent to premium numbers.

If you're looking for a bit of light reading this holiday season, Cambridge University is here to help: they've digitized and made available online over 4,000 pages of the pioneering scientist and mathemetician Sir Isaac Newton's most important works.

IBM and Oracle agree about little these days, and they are coming at it from different angles, but both IT giants believe that some companies don't want general-purpose machines; they want machines tuned to run a specific stack of software for a particular kind of workload.